Essay: National Road

It is impossible to talk about the I-70 without looking into its
history, and for more than 150 years that history has been the
“National Road.”

Before the National Road

In the 17th and 18th century, the Appalachian Mountains formed a
major obstacle for East-West traffic. During colonial times, the colonies
did not really extend beyond the mountains. Access to the land
behind the Appalachians was chiefly around the North (from Lake
Eerie down) or around the South (up the Mississippi).

The first real road across the middle of the Appalachians was built
in 1755 as a military road. The British general Edward Braddock led an
expedition in the French and Indian Wars to attack the
French fort at what is now the site of Pittsburgh, with the goal to
continue fighting the French on the central plains. The road he built
to move his troops got to be known as the
Braddock Road [Wikipedia].

General Braddock was fatally wounded when his expedition ran into an
Indian and French force. His troops buried him in the middle
of the road and then marched over his grave, to hide the fact that someone
was buried here and thus preventing Indians from disturbing the grave.

First Highway

In 1806, President Jefferson authorized the construction of the
Cumberland Road, which was to connect the Eastern states with the
Ohio river. The road started at Cumberland and went East, mostly following
Braddock’s road, and then on to Wheeling, VA (nowadays Wheeling,
WV). This road connected with the navigable rivers of the Potomac on the
East side and the Ohio on the West side.

During the first half of the 19th century, this
National Road [Wikipedia] was extended
Eastward to Baltimore, and Westward to St. Louis, MO and later to
Vandalia, IL. Maintenance of the road passed to the hands of the various
states and often different parts of the road were in disrepair. Yet,
during this period the National Road was one of the major arteries
for the Westward emigration into Ohio and beyond.

Decay and Decline

With the rise of the railroads in the middle of the 19th century,
the National Road lost a lot of its importance. Although the road had
started out as a Federal initiative, responsibility for the maintenance
was quickly passed to the individual states. With interstate traffic
going mostly by train, the National Road devolved into a patchwork of
locally maintained farm roads and stretches of deeply rutted dirt roads.

Resurgence as US-40

Early in the 20th century, with the advent of the automobile, the
National Road made a come-back. When in the mid-1920s the Joint Board
on Interstate Highways was formed, and a system of U.S. Highways was
established, the National Road became
US-40 [Wikipedia]. Over the past
century the exact has shifted in some places from the original National
Road, and it has been extended on both ends, but to this day US-40
is still known as the National Pike.

Interstate I-70

Interstate 70 mostly parallels the path of US-40 and its predecessors,
in some places joining with US-40. One notable exception is that I-70
turns north into Pennsylvania from Cumberland, MD where the National
Road (and US-40) continue on a more direct westward course (about what
is now I-68, the National Freeway).